This specification relates to correcting misspelled entity names in user queries.
Internet search engines provide information about Internet accessible resources (e.g., Web pages, images, text documents, multimedia content) that are responsive to a user's search query and present information about the resources in a manner that is useful to the user. Internet search engines return a set of search results (e.g., as a ranked list of results) in response to a user submitted query. A search result includes, for example, a URL and a snippet of information from a corresponding resource.
Each query includes one or more terms, e.g., one or more words or phrases. Conventional search engines match the terms of a user's query to an index of resources in order to identify responsive search results. However, if a term in the query is misspelled, a search engine will have difficulty identifying responsive search results.
Some search engines correct the spelling in a user query by comparing the terms in the query to a dictionary of known terms, and correcting spellings when the spellings are close to, but do not exactly match, the dictionary terms. However, some terms used in queries do not appear in these dictionaries, and therefore, cannot be corrected using these conventional techniques. For example, entity names, especially entity names of ordinary (non-famous) entities often do not appear in dictionaries. An entity can be, for example, a person, a business, an organization, a product, a brand name, a team, a piece of art, or a music piece.